The arrival of the most recent issue of MAARAV (15.2) was a poignant blend of joy and melancholy. Joy in that my article about the odd Hebrew word galgal was finally published, and melancholy in that this will likely be my last academic article. I began publishing academic pieces back in the early 90’s and kept a steady stream going until being abruptly dismissed from Nashotah House. Research requires a regular, steady employment situation with access to obscure materials and a somewhat predictable teaching load. Since being cast into the outer darkness of the adjuncts’ world, well, it’s awfully dim out here to try to devote the scant free time to in-depth study. Such is the world of academics.

This article was a spin-off of a much larger project – a book that was completely written and rejected by a noteworthy publisher and lies dormant on a hard-drive somewhere – on the weather terminology in the Psalms. Several publishers expressed minimal interest, and this article was an effort to demonstrate how weather language has been sublimated due to faulty methodology. The unusual word galgal likely derives from a root with connotations of circularity. Nineteenth-century travelers in the Levant associated the word with tumbleweeds, and this association has stuck ever since. In my article I sort through the lexical information seeking some kind of consensus in the West Semitic language family for a more solid understanding of this troublesome lexeme. To the unbiased observer, the earlier favored translation of “whirlwind” still holds a considerable amount of evidence.

This particular paper holds an enduring place in my memory. I first read it at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in 2001 in Denver. Well, I started to read it. The morning of my paper I’d visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to see the famed dinosaur and mineral exhibits. While in the museum I became violently ill and had to take a taxi back to my hotel. When I tried to read the fated paper that afternoon, nausea swept over me and I couldn’t finish it. Somehow, returning to a project that had made me physically ill held little appeal, no matter what its academic merits. The paper sat, forgotten, until I thought to submit it to MAARAV a couple years back. Now it awaits the criticism of others while I move on to other things. I do hope that this humble contribution to Hebrew lexicography might be taken seriously since like Denver’s dinosaurs, it is the last of its kind.